Monthly Archives: November 2011

Kismeteer, a fellow alliance director in Goonswarm, created this graph showing details of every patch since the launch of Eve Online. Click on this link or on the image to see the full version:

Eve Online releases

So much information.

Standout figures for me are the tailing-off of growth post-Dominion then the actual fall in average sessions with the last patch. There is also a clear division into two halves: the skills and ships and modules come overwhelminingly in the first half of Eve’s life, whereas recent patches, for all that the patch notes were lengthier, contain vastly less flying-in-space meat.

This may, partly, reflect better documentation. But it also reflects a lot of lines of “the final spawn in this mission will no longer disappear when you roll five on 1D6” and less “this new module will let you kill this new ship and requires this new skill.”

Still, there is a tiny but noticeable rise in some datasets with this patch: new skills; new ships; new modules. And, after the emptiness of the preceding two releases, a real rise in the patch notes required to documents them Hope!

About half of the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece get the credit for coming up with “Gnothi Seauton” in one source or another, but it remains good advice: “know yourself”

It is a truism to say that people play Massively Multiplayer Online games such as Eve Online for a number of reasons. One thing that startles me is that some people play for reasons that have very little to do with the online, shared space element of the game. It surprises me because, if you want to enjoy a single-player game, then Eve Online can’t compete with, well, a single-player game. In the latter, you are the focus of the universe, and will probably journey from insignificance to world-bestriding colossus. Or at the very least, death-dealing ninja of terror. Continue reading Gnothi Seauton – Why you play→

Yesterday’s post found me hunting a wormhole, It also found me thinking better of trying to grief 100 Russians out of their particular Class 3, mainly on the grounds of effort.

Older and more jaded individuals may be wondering why I am even interested in putting all this effort into a C3 wormhole. After all, I suspect that it will be about as profitable as running L4s in empire with no Concord and constant wardecs while having to maintain a tower which can only be fuelled on two days out of every week. Meanwhile, Kazanir, head of EJB, is merrily running a C5 largely by himself using an array of capitals.

Part of this is the eternal Eve suspicion that that new thing will be it: the One True Fun Form of PvE. This hunt for a palatable way to pay for a supercarrier or a titan (Goonswarm directors don’t get to embezzle the alliance money) is a result of the sheer number of options that Eve offers. And of almost all of them being unbearable variations of “Wait. See red ‘X’. Press button. Wait again.”

Another part of this project’s attraction for me is that I have always had a secret, guilty pleasure in a well-planned logistics operation. When I took a bunch of guys and took T-PAR in the first rush of the Delve invasion, I got ten large deathstars, five per night, smuggled in, onlined, fuelled and stronted without a single hitch, despite the attentions of Executive Outcomes. I then ran them solo for six weeks. The one cock-up was not spotting that one BoB tower we had killed and replaced was sitting on a valuable R64 that could have paid for the whole thing. Oh well.

But of course it all comes down to how and why you play MMOs. I intend to blog about the Bartle test later, but I have a strong Explorer element to my gameplay, whether that be exploring game mechanics or exploring virtual worlds. Indeed, given that I enjoy strapping on a rucksack and heading into the hills alone to camp for a few days, this is clearly not limited to MMOs. Fortunately, the Scottish highlands contain less gankers with 720mm projectile weapons.

Anyway, I probed and I probed my way across a bunch of Gallente systems, finding plenty of wormholes, some of them empty. But C3s seemed to be extremely popular. I found plenty of empty Class 4s and a few occupied Class 5s: I suspect that the less organised corporations whose members want to be able to solo outside of occasional ops jump at the C3s with statics to group content. I also suspect that the organised groups who prefer to run raid-style content in groups grap the more profitable Class 5s and 6s. This may leave Class Fours as the less desirable cousins. I say “may” because two or three nights’ of scanning by one neonate is hardly a representative sample.

Anyway, three wormholes deep on Sunday evening I found, at last, an empty Class 3. It was pretty far from ideal. It was a Black Hole system, the bonuses for which seem at best unhelpful unless one is speed tanking. The static is to nullsec, which I suspect means that I will at best go through a lot of strontium as it repeatedly opens up wormholes to Russian space. But I was getting bored and the weekend was almost over, so I grabbed my freighter in empire and started moving my pre-prepared setup towards the jump-off system in highsec.

My plan was to deploy a base first, in the form of a medium tower that I could online quickly, then to use the CHA there to assemble everything I needed before deploying a large tower. A freighter can’t ever get into a C3, so when I got the freighter to the jump-off system in empire, next door to the highsec entrance point (which had no station), I assembled an Iteron V and a bestower – the lows a cautious mixture of expanders and stabilisers – and started packing the basics into them: the tower; fuel; a couple of hardeners; a few hours of stront to get going with. The stront and enough fuel to get the tower online for a few hours in one ship and the rest of the fuel in the other: no need for stront if I don’t have a tower after all!

I started the tower onlining and left the Iteron V sitting on-grid, cloaked, 200km from it with fuel and stront. I’ve had to fuel and online a tower with 70 people shooting it before now, and I had no illusions about what would happen to my hauler in such a situation, but I also know what the effect is on hostiles if that easy killmail just developed a timer until the shields go up.

I wish I could make this bit more exciting and add some dramatic, timer-based pizazz, but I can’t. To be quite honest , the tower onlined successfully without further incident. Sorry.

Ever since the Apocalypse update to Eve, which saw the introduction of wormhole space – I have been tempted to give W-Space living a try. On Sunday, I staked my little claim to my own little pocket universe. If I should get ganked, think only this of me: that there is some corner of a foreign wormhole that is forever Goonswarm.

Having at last got round to teaching myself the new probing system in order to probe down hostiles on-grid I set out, on Friday evening, to find a location. This was to be a solo project, so I decided to start out with a Class 3 wormhole. This, everyone said, could be just about reliably solo-run, and I would have a few of my army of alts available, so should be able to dual-box whatever came my way. Going for a Class 3 also gave me a fair chance of getting an empire wormhole every now and then in order to aid logistics.

Goonswarm was born of grief and shaped for the infliction of misery. Once exposed to it ourselves we adopted it, refined it, and loosed it upon the rest of Eve. We were seen as untrustworthy, vicious, and irrational. Any outsiders’ discussion of us would feature the same few, furious, confused, desperate allegations: griefers, cheaters, hackers, scammers… To us, each was a compliment.

But for a long time this basic cultural identity of ours was put aside. We had a war to win – against Band of Brothers – and that took up all of our efforts. Taking years, it was the greatest act of planned griefing in the game’s history. We won, and were rewarded with such forum porn as dreams are made of. But it required us to be ordered, focused and efficient.

That time is past. We have returned to our roots. Take a look at the official Eve Online forums and you will find page after page of threads complaining that we are ruining the game for miners, industrialists, mission-runners and more. Our victims lose scores of hours and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of the tedious, dreary effort they have put themselves through every time we strike, and they simply cannot comprehend why or how it occurred.

They accuse us of exploiting; of hacking the official forums; of being CCP developers.

Join Goonswarm in Eve and you can do all this: within a day or so of starting you can have a character that can help destroy some hapless soul’s pride and joy. And the alliance will pay for you to do so, replacing your ships and rewarding you for your efforts. And you can try it for free for at least two weeks.

The winter patch is coming: Assault Ships will be buffed; gallente ships will be improved across the board; hybrid weapons are improving dramatically; supercapitals are being hit hard; T2 ammo is being ungimped; tier 3 battlecruisers fielding battleship weapons are being introduced; Time Dilation is being introduced to improve your ship’s responsiveness in fleet fights; nullsec is being enhanced. The list goes on and on.